February i, 1882.] THE TROPICAL 
AGRICULTURIST. 
685 
To the Editor of the Ceylon Observer. 
A QUININE FACTORY FOR COLOMBO. 
Edinburgh, 1st December 1881. 
Dear Sir, — Upon having a talk with a mercantile 
gentleman, who is utterly unconnected vviih Kastern 
produce, on our present system of shipping cinchona 
bark, he expressed his astonishment at the waste of 
money entailed upon the producers, in freight, conse- 
quent upon the increased, and annually increasing, 
production of bark, all over the East, and in tlie 
present tendency of the age to employ capital in the 
establishment of Companies, in order to secure suit- 
able returns for money. Why not take measures to 
initiate a quinine factory, eitber in Ceylon, or on the 
Indian coast, where producers of bark could, as in 
the case of coffee, either sell their bark at the mills, 
for cash, or, have it prepared into tpiinine, and ship- 
ped, on their own account? 
If the country is not ready for this plan, yet, de- 
pend upon it, if the cinchona industry succeeds, as 
it at present promises to do, it must come to this, 
sooner, or later ; and the first in the field will make 
the most. I have no idea whatever of what would 
be the capital required for sueh an undertaking. No 
double it would be large, but so also would be its 
profits. Neither have 1 the least knowledge of what 
an t of material or plant would be requisite for such. 
All this remains to be calculated by those who know, 
and by such the subject may be worth consideration. 
Our present system of shipping barks is even a 
much more wasteful one tbau if coffee planters were 
to ship their coffee, dried in the husk. 
As your pages are ever open to all notions of ad- 
vance, I just write you on the subject, in order to 
draw out further opinions, either from yourself, or 
through coi respondents. In the present scarcity of 
tonnage all over the world, what a waste of room !— 
not to speak of cash !— And in the present difficulty of 
finding lucrative but safe investment for capital, it 
would appear to m.e that an undertaking in this 
would meet the difficulty. — Yours truly, 
P. D. MILLIE. 
LEDGERIANA SEED. 
13th December, 1S81. 
Dkar Sir, — With referenco to the letters of "X. Y. 
Z." and " One Who Bought And Was Sold," I am glad 
to be able to say that tlie seed bought by meat Mr. 
Nymons' sale, on the 21st September last, has germinated 
and come on very well. 1 mention this, as tlie last 
paragraph of the letter of " One Who Bought and Was 
bold" might lead people to think that all the seed 
purchased " from the same quarter" turned out bad. — 
Yours faithtully, R. 
QUINETUM MANUFACTURE IN S1KKIM : 
M EL QAMM1E IN REl'LY TO MR. HOWARD. 
Dear Sir,— In your weekly edition of the 31st 
October appears a letter fn in Mr. Howard to the 
Secretary oi State for India, in which lie offers remarks 
on what ho considers to be tho very unsatisfactory 
Condition atul prospects of the manufacture in Sikkim 
of cinchona feorifuge, or, as 1 shall call it in this 
communication, fur tho sake of brevity, quiialum. 
It is well-known that Mr. Howard, ns becomes his 
nan\o, takes a lively interest in tho production of a 
febrifuge that .shall bo an effectual remedy for malarious 
fevers, and at the •aino time be so cheap as to hi' within 
tho means of thy very poorest oi India ; and I ltd sure 
that he will be thankful for my poor attempt to set 
him right in a few errors he has fallen into — no doubt 
through an over-hasty perusal of the cinchona papers 
sent to him for criticism— and will rejoice to know 
that the Sikkim quinetum is already produced at a 
little over half the cost he quotes, and that year by 
year the opinion of the Indian medical profession 
steadily grows in favor of the drug, so much so 
indeed as to have reduced the imports of quinine to 
Calcutta last year by no less than 44 per cent. 
It is unfortunate that Mr Howard begins by omitting 
dates, for from the fact of his letter bearing so late 
a date as the 21st June of the current year, the public 
will naturally infer that tho results up to ne;.rly that 
date are ^iven, and bis argumsnts and calculations 
founded tnereon. But in the very first paragraph 
details are given of the financial year ending 31st 
March 1S77, when quinetum manufacture in Sikkim 
was in its infancy, without any remark to show that 
they are not, for a later year ; and to make confusion 
more intensified a quotation is given — in the very same 
paragraph — from Mr. Moens' report for the year 1879, 
the year in this case being specified, For that year — 
ending 31st March 1877— the figures are correctly given; 
the out-turn of quinetum was less than 2 per cent of 
the bark worked, and its cost over R16-3 the pound. 
But the figures for last year show that the cost had 
been reduced to unrler R9-4 the pound, and the out- 
turn increased to considerably over 2i per cent. For 
the year before, the figures for which Mr. Howard 
must have overlooked, as his letter bears internal evid- 
ence that he bad the cinchona papers published up to 
the latter part of 1880 before him, the co.t was R102 
the pound, and the outi urn also over 2^ per cent. So 
the price is being steadily reduced, and the day i3 not 
far distant when the producing cost will be as low as 
RS the pound, and probably lower; for, as the plant- 
ations have hitherto been under-cropped, there is a wide 
margin for contingencies and every prospect of still moro 
favorable result., Mr. Howard will be glael to know 
that long acconij l:ahed facts have placed beyond dis- 
pute that he was in error in assuming that the cost 
could not be "much lessened" fr >m R 1G-3 the pound. 
He then goes on to show that the supposed cheapness — 
italics are Mr. Howard's — is all a fallacy, and to compare 
the quinetum unfavorably, both as regards cost and 
efficacy with cinchomo sulphas which, it is stated, 
could be bought at i!5 the pouud. But it appears to 
me that it would have been fairer to have compared it, 
at least as regards cost, with the quinetum manufact- 
ured by Whiffen, which is avowedly a similar drug, 
in appearance and composition to that made in Sikkim. 
The price of it Whiffen puts, m manufactured by him 
for tlie Madras Government, at 53 shillings the pound, 
which is about double the cost charged to the Bengal 
Government for the Sikkim quinetum, viz. R16-8. 
Mr. Whiffi-n at the same time puts the price of 
the cinchonine alkaloid, which is, I presume, com- 
mercially, an inferior drug to cinchona; sulphas, at 
15s. a pound. I veuture to say that had sulphate of 
quinine itself beeu tried, in the experiments Mr. 
Howard refers to, against cinchona) sulphas the cost 
would have been still more in favor of the latter than 
wheu compared with quinetum. And as regards 
efficacy these same experiments showed that, whilst 
about 22 per cent of the patient* treated with cinchon- 
ine sulphate were returned as uneurcd,* 7 per cent 
only of those treated with quinetum w<rc returned 
uneurcd. It is to be regretted that whilst what at 
tint mu'ht appear to bo damaging quotat'ous against 
the qunetum arc given by Mr. Howurd from tho paper 
referred to, those in its favor aro entirely omitted, 
tho moro especially 10 as ho continues ot p*r»graph 7 : — 
• Mr. Moens told us that oinohonins hasbicutx* 
eluded Low the Gtrujau i , i)aiUJatojuua.--ED, 
